First, it’s important to understand what Sowell is saying in his essay titled “Black Rednecks and White Liberals.” He is not saying that Scots-Irish culture, as it existed/exists in the US, and especially the rural Southern US, merely influenced African-American culture. That claim would be nearly universally accepted by scholars. Poor whites and blacks have lived close to each other for hundreds of years, and there has been much interchange between the two communities. This means that yes, some amount of Scots-Irish-American culture has influenced African-American culture and vice versa.
Recently, there has been a lot of interest in the African/black origins of the banjo, an instrument often associated with rural white music like old-time and bluegrass. I talked about this in an episode of the AskHistorians Podcast. Less well-known today is the tradition of ballads among Black Americans, an adaptation of the ballad tradition commonly found in Britain and Ireland. Popular folk songs like “John Henry” and “Stagolee” are examples of these types of songs, which have many hallmarks of these British/Irish ballads but are both by and about Black Americans. If you’re looking for some nice listening, the album Classic African-American Ballads on the Smithsonian Folkways Label has some great recordings of these songs.
This is one tiny slice of Southern culture, but it shows that there was great interchange between communities that are often thought of in rigid boxes. One influenced another and vice versa, and often those influences compounded between them in a kind of blended culture. You can see, as another example, the popularity of various strands of Evangelical, Pentecostal, and Charismatic Christianities in both white and Black communities in the South, and similarities in theology even between church groups that are otherwise quite racially segregated.
However, this simple concept of interchange is not what Sowell is contending. Sowell argues that black culture basically reproduced or took on poor white Southern culture, not just that it was influenced by it. And what exactly was this culture?
The cultural values and social patterns prevalent among Southern whites included an aversion to work, proneness to violence, neglect of education, sexual promiscuity, improvidence, drunkenness, lack of entrepreneurship, reckless searches for excitement, lively music and dance, and a style of religious oratory marked by strident rhetoric, unbridled emotions, and flamboyant imagery.
First off, it’s obvious to see where Sowell is going here. He also includes various anecdotes and quotes in the essay to try to show that all the stereotypes often associated with Black people in the US, especially poor black people, were once associated with poor whites. Or, as he puts it,
Much of the cultural pattern of Southern rednecks became the cultural heritage of Southern blacks, more so than survivals of African cultures, with which they had not been in contact for centuries. (Even in colonial times, most blacks on American soil had been born on American soil.)
And so if this culture was passed from poor whites down to poor blacks, where did the whites get it? Sowell traces it to varying migration patterns from Britain and Ireland throughout the years. Crucially, his argument is that poor whites in the American South came from certain areas, namely Northern Ireland, Highland Scotland, and Wales. Of particular interest are the so-called “Scots-Irish,” descendants of Scottish planters in Northern Ireland who ended up emigrating to the US.
It’s obvious that one source Sowell uses and cites is Grady McWhiney’s Cracker Culture: Celtics Ways in the Old South. McWhiney uses the term “Celtic Fringe” for these areas he sees as the edges of Britain, the areas where the old “Celtic” culture remained and stayed with the people who would eventually emigrate to the US. These Celtic cultures supposedly had a number of tendencies, including many listed in the quote above, and people in those areas supposedly were imbued with these cultural characteristics more so than the populations that emigrated to other areas of the US like New England and the mid-Atlantic states. These remnants of old “Celtic” culture eventually became the backbone of so-called “Redneck” or “Cracker” culture of poor whites in the Southern US.
There are a number of issues with this characterization, though, the first of which is that “Celtic” is a fairly dicey way to describe many of the people McWhiney and Sowell are discussing. In fact, the Scots-Irish, also known as Ulster Scots were/are primarily descended from lowland Scottish people who would not have been Gaelic/“Celtic” language speakers. This was a large part of the reason why they were brought to Ireland in the first place, as part of a plantation to displace the Gaelic residents of Ulster, the northern province of Ireland. Ulster Scots are, in fact, in many ways defined in opposition to Celtic culture!
But the broader problem with Sowell and McWhiney’s point, and a problem with discussion of culture in Appalachia and the rural South in general, has to do with the idea of cultural stasis. Appalachian culture has often been looked at as a sort of “frozen in time” museum of “primitive” culture. In the first half of the 20th century, for example, many ethnomusicologists and folk musicians scoured the land in droves looking for music that was untouched by modernity, a potential window into the lost American music of ages past. They made field recordings and notes, and this shaped generations of ideas about what “old American music” really was.
To a certain extent, there was some truth to this. There is, for example, a rich ballad tradition in Appalachia that includes ballads also found in Britain and Ireland. These have been passed down through generations, so there is antiquity there! However, crucially, they can end up quite different in form and content from their cousins overseas. You can hear this in ballads collected in both sides of the pond, take this recording of Jackie Frazier from Kentucky and this one of Jack the Sailor from Scotland. Ultimately, they come from the same source in origin long, long ago, but they are very, very different!
This again is a very tiny sliver of an example, but the same process is true for every aspect of culture you can imagine. Look at Italian-American food vs the current food of Italy as a very prominent example. Even in Appalachia and the rural South, which seem to many to be “stuck” in some backwards time, culture is constantly evolving and adapting. That’s not to say that there aren’t aspects of culture that can endure, but trying to find the “essential root” of a culture by looking hundreds of years into the past ignores the developments that happen over those hundreds of years.
Sowell actually acknowledges that himself in the quote I mentioned above, where he says that most African-Americans were born on US soil as a way of discounting the African roots of Black American culture. On the same page, he’s saying that the descendants of Scots-Irish immigrants kept their culture nearly whole cloth, but denying that Africans brought over by the slave trade kept any of theirs! This alone is probably enough to show some of the issues with his reasoning.
In the podcast episode linked above I use the banjo as a great example of the ways that we try to assign essential meaning to things in American culture. Nowadays, it has become somewhat common to see the banjo referred to as an “African” or “originally African” instrument. This is largely a sort of backlash against the many, many years where black contributions to banjo history have been ignored and erased. But that, too, ignores and erases hundreds of years of history on American soil, centuries of development of the banjo as an instrument and of the music that is played on the banjo. It’s a fairly ugly history in parts (the banjo largely became popular in the US due to the popularity of blackface minstrelsy), but it is also uniquely American.
In short, Sowell’s arguments are reductionist and essentialist, and not particularly credible historically. There was and is absolutely plenty of cultural exchange between poor black and white communities, in the South and elsewhere. But searching for the origins of black culture in Ulster 400 years ago is not going to be particularly fruitful.
